The political economy of churches in Denmark over 700 years

Ella Paldam and Martin Paldam
Additional contact information
Ella Paldam: Department of Culture and Society; Aarhus University

Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University

Abstract: This paper reports new macro time-series for the number and size of churches in Denmark from year 1300 to 2000. Church densities are defined as the series per capita. The densities are interpreted as a proxy for religiosity. It is falling throughout all 700 years, but two events gave an extra fall: 1) The Reformation of Catholicism into Lutheranism in the first half of the 16th century caused a fall of 9%, and 2) modern economic growth after 1820 caused a fourfold fall as predicted by the theory of the religious transition. We suggest that similar data for all European countries would show the same strong reaction of church densities to modern economic growth.

Keywords: Church stock; religiosity; transition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N13 N14 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32
Date: 2015-05-07
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gro, nep-his and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.econ.au.dk/repec/afn/wp/15/wp15_11.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aah:aarhec:2015-11

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (bhoejklint@econ.au.dk).